Jeremy Corr

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https://media.blubrry.com/whenitmattered/content.blubrry.com/whenitmattered/When_it_Mattered_21_RD_7.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Email | RSS Ep. 21 — A disenchanted doctor finds secret inspiration for his groundbreaking Parkinson’s research from a heroin addict / Dr. Andrews Lees, University College of London, Institute of Neurology. Dr. Andrew Lees was a young medical student when he realized that his profession was not everything it was cut out to be. Feeling suffocated by the conservative and powerful British medical system, which gave little room for independent thought and experimentation, Lees was at risk for dropping out. Then one day, Lees, a Liverpool-born avid Beatles fan saw the cover of their new album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. When Lees scanned the celebrity-laden faces on the album cover, he saw someone he didn’t recognize. It was William S. Burroughs, the Beat Generation writer, heroin addict, and harsh critic of doctors and the medical establishment. Feeling quite anti-establishment himself, Lees began reading Burroughs’ work, starting with his most controversial book, “Naked Lunch,” and was soon sucked into Burroughs’ intellectual orbit. Lees was inspired and influenced by Burroughs’ writings about his frequent self-experimentation with dangerous opiates and his efforts to kick his various drug addictions. Re-energized, Lees dedicated his career to conduct ground-breaking research into the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, including using the drug Apomorphine to treat advanced complications of the disease — a drug  Burroughs had used to kick his heroin addiction. Lees became one of the world’s most respected and cited neurologists on the disease. Because of Burroughs’ checkered reputation, Lees kept his “Invisible Mentor,” a deep secret because he was afraid his colleagues would ostracize him. But late into his distinguished career, Lees finally picked up his courage and told the world about his muse through his book, Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment. Tanscript Download the PDF Chitra Ragavan:   For much of his celebrated career renowned British neurologist, Dr. Andrew Lees, kept a deep professional secret from his peers and the world. The secret was that his groundbreaking research into Parkinson’s disease was deeply influenced by the controversial American writer and heroin addict, William S. Burroughs. It all began when Dr. Lees, saw a face he didn’t recognize on the cover of the Beatles album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Acting on idle curiosity, Lees learned it was William Burroughs. Pretty soon Lees was going down the Burroughs rabbit hole, learning from a man he would never meet, but who would become his life-long invisible mentor. Chitra Ragavan:   Hello, everyone. I’m Chitra Ragavan, and this is, When it Mattered. This episode is brought to you by Good Story, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. I’m joined today by Dr. Andrew Lees, Professor of Neurology at University College, London Institute of Neurology. His book about Burroughs is called, Mentored by a Madman: The William Burroughs Experiment. Dr Lees, welcome to the podcast. Dr. Lees:   Thank you, Chitra. Chitra Ragavan:   You achieved global recognition and many, many awards for your work on Parkinson’s disease and abnormal movement disorders and you are one of the most cited researchers in the field. And one could argue that no one should be less afraid of ostracism by your peers than you. What was it about William Burroughs himself and about the culture of the medical profession that made you afraid to disclose his influence on your work and why did you keep it a secret for so long? Dr. Lees:   Well even today, the British medical establishment is very conservative and also very powerful. So that, if you blot your copybook particularly as a trainee, you end up in the Outer Hebrides during something that you don’t really want to do. We were all, I think certainly as trainees quite fearful because unlike the United States which is far bigger, you could move to another hospital or another institution, the number of options available to, for example, a medical resident was quite few. We really watch our Ps and Qs and be very careful if we wanted to get the patronage from seniors. We really needed to advance in our career. If you really wanted to be a neurologist it was highly competitive, and you had to toe the line. Really, there was no room for rebelliousness or anti-establishmentism. Chitra Ragavan:   Burroughs was not a poster child for good behavior. Dr. Lees:   No, I mean, of course most doctors didn’t even know he was in fact, at least the younger doctors. I mean, the people of my own generation, children of the 60s, I mean, most people would know at least about him. They may never have read him that he was involved with the counter culture and the movement of the beats and so on. But later on he was really, I think, largely forgotten and very few doctors would have read him. He wouldn’t be the sort of person that you would recommend to a young person hoping to take up a career in medicine. Chitra Ragavan:   What was it about him? What were his most controversial aspects of his writing and his thinking, just to name a few for those who are not that familiar with his work? Dr. Lees:   Well, when I first read Naked Lunch, I didn’t know whether to vomit or laugh. It’s a mixture of routines almost carnival-like in which well, one intermixes very humorous sketches, particularly, Dr. Benway, the antithesis of a good doctor with sort of urinal lavatory humor involving hanging, which is called… people hanging themselves for what’s called angel lust, to get sexual gratification. Some very lurid homosexual scenes, particularly for the 60s when homosexuality was still illegal both in the States and in the UK. Dr. Lees:   There were some things when I first read Naked Lunch that I really found quite repulsive. And his life of course, was a very difficult one. He was as you mentioned in the introduction, he was a heroin addict. He

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https://media.blubrry.com/whenitmattered/content.blubrry.com/whenitmattered/When_it_Mattered_20_RD2.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Email | RSS   Ep. 20 — A police officer is brought back to life after a near-fatal motorcycle crash and takes on a profound new mission / Frank Shankwitz, Creator and a Co-Founder, Make-A-Wish Foundation.  Arizona Highway Patrol Officer Frank Shankwitz  was chasing after a drunk driver one day at 85 miles an hour when his motorcycle broadsided a second drunk driver who cut in front of him. His partner could not revive Shankwitz who had suffered grievous injuries and reported him dead at the scene. But an off-duty emergency room nurse driving past the crash performed CPR for four minutes and literally brought Shankwitz back to life. Recovering slowly from his injuries, Shankwitz didn’t fully realize the implications of getting a reprieve from death until his counselor urged him to find deeper meaning. Two years later, when he was asked to cheer up a terminally ill seven-year-old boy who was a huge fan of highway motorcycle squads because of the popular television show CHiPS, Shankwitz found that higher cause. The result was the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which today, forty years after Shankwitz created and co-founded it, has granted more than half a million wishes of children with life-threatening illnesses. After having lived a childhood filled with homelessness and poverty, Shankwitz has created a life for himself that’s rich in meaning by giving sick children around the world a wealth of happiness from their dreams coming true. Transcript Download the PDF Chitra Ragavan:   Hello, everyone. I’m Chitra Ragavan, and this is When It Mattered. When It Mattered is a podcast on how leaders deal with and learn from adversity. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. My guest today is Frank Shankwitz, the creator and a co-founder of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, a global charity that fulfills the wishes of children with life-threatening illnesses. Chitra Ragavan:   Shankwitz has taken the lessons learned from his early years of extreme poverty and homelessness and has spent most of his adult life giving back. A US Air Force veteran, Shankwitz served as an Arizona Highway Patrol motorcycle officer and a homicide detective with the Arizona Department of Public Safety. Retiring after 42 years on the force, Shankwitz has received many awards for his work with the Make-A-Wish Foundation, the White House Call to Service award from both President George W. Bush and president Donald J. Trump, and the Making A Difference in The World award from the US Military Academy at West Point, just to name a few. Chitra Ragavan:   Mr. Shankwitz, welcome to the podcast. Frank Shankwitz:   Thank you. I appreciate the invitation. Chitra Ragavan:   Your early years, as I said, were filled with poverty and homelessness and separation from one or other parent. Could you describe what those early years were like? Frank Shankwitz:   Interesting, I never thought they were that bad, but Hollywood made a movie about it, so I guess they were. I was born in Chicago, and, at two years old, my mother divorced my father and left. We never knew where, had no idea where she went. In later years, I figured out, because she would never tell me, that she went to Arizona. Ages two to five were just very happy years living with my grandparents, while my dad worked down on weekends, aunts, uncles, cousins, just a lot of fun times. Frank Shankwitz:   At five years old, I was in kindergarten on a playground, and a lady grabbed me, dragged me, and she said, “I’m your mother,” I have no idea who this lady was, and actually kidnapped me off the playground, screaming and fighting, but when you’re five years old and you get a thump on the head, you kind of be quiet, and she said, “We’re going to Arizona,” but she took a strange route to Arizona, and we ended up what I later learned was Michigan, upper Michigan, Upper Peninsula, and this is a whole different lifestyle. Frank Shankwitz:   Our home for that summer she introduced me to was a tent and a campground right on Lake Michigan shores, and I’m going from a real nice city type livelihood to, all of a sudden, nothing and, again, very traumatic for a while, especially very little to eat, no food, and she’s gone all day. She’s working in this one little village that was close by, leaving me by myself, but it turned out to be somewhat of a good thing in the long run because I had to start learning survival, self-survival. Frank Shankwitz:   I just explored. I learned about the country life. I learned about the woods. I’m watching other people what to do. I even taught myself how to swim by just watching other people and actually began to enjoy that until the winter hit, and then she found, because it’s just… We can’t stay in the snow there in the tent, but she found just an old, old farmhouse, drafty and everything, and that was like that for several years up until 10 years old when my mother… when my father found us, and he went in to get the local sheriff to have her arrested. Frank Shankwitz:   During that time, she threw everything we had in… which wasn’t much… In a car, and we started that journey to Arizona. It took six weeks, and, again, I had really no idea where Arizona was. I had watched some Western movies every now and then, and the reason it took so long is she would drive for half a day, she’d be low on money, she’d get a job at a local restaurant as a waitress, get enough tip money for gas, and off we go, and during that whole journey, we’re sleeping in the car. Frank Shankwitz:   We just get outside of a little town called Seligman, Arizona, up on the northern part of Arizona, on old

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https://media.blubrry.com/whenitmattered/content.blubrry.com/whenitmattered/When_it_Mattered_19_RD2.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Email | RSS Ep. 19 — An aspiring scientist rejects the impersonal sterility of the profession to become a science writer and stumbles upon a gripping emotional saga of courage, heroism, and sacrifice / Sam Kean, Author, The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb. It wasn’t until the third year of college and endless science classes that Sam Kean realized he was temperamentally unsuited to becoming a scientist. Shaken by the realization that he had to reinvent his future, Kean took to science writing and found his niche as a best-selling author. But although he had majored in Physics in college, Kean was writing about everything but physics. Until one day, when he heard about the so-called Bastard Brigade, a rag-tag group of scientists and spies who had coalesced around a common goal, to thwart Hitler from building an atomic bomb during WWII. Kean quickly realized that he had finally stumbled upon a physics story worth telling. Because the story of the Bastard Brigade was not just about the dry, dispassionate nuclear physics, chemistry, and history of the atomic bomb. It was as much about the hero’s journey of a group of ill-fated and unlikely leaders, who had willingly embarked on a fool-hardy and dangerous mission, ready to sacrifice their lives for a higher cause. When he had least expected it, Kean had discovered the human face of science. Transcript Download the PDF Chitra Ragavan:   Hello, everyone. I’m Chitra Ragavan, and this is When It Mattered. When It Mattered is a podcast on how leaders deal with and learn from adversity. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. My guest today is the New York Times bestselling author, Sam Kean. His latest book is called The Bastard Brigade: The True Story of the Renegade Scientists and Spies Who Sabotaged the Nazi Atomic Bomb. Kean also is the author of other science bestsellers: The Disappearing Spoon, The Violinist’s Thumb, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, and Caesar’s Last Breath. His stories have appeared in The Best American Nature and Science Writing, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Slate, and his work has been featured on NPR’s Radiolab, Science Friday, and Fresh Air. Sam, welcome to the podcast. Sam Kean:   Hello. Thanks for having me. Chitra Ragavan:   Did you always know that this was what you wanted to do in life, to become a writer, and particularly, a science writer? Sam Kean:   No, actually I, for a long time, thought I was going to be a scientist. When I was going through high school, I was taking all the science classes I could in every subject, and then got to college in Minnesota and was very focused again on science. I was a physics major. It really wasn’t until about my third or so year in college when things swerved on me a little bit. I just realized that temperamentally, maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a scientist in that I started working in some different labs that were doing research, and I realized that I just wasn’t enjoying doing the research as much as I thought I was. I didn’t like the fact that you spent all your time building and tinkering with equipment. I was a little clumsy with it, couldn’t get it to work right all the time. Sam Kean:   For really the first time in my life, I started to wonder, “Well, maybe I don’t actually want to be a scientist anymore.” It was a little scary in that I had been focused on being a scientist for so long that I really almost didn’t know who I was anymore if I wasn’t going to be a scientist. Basically, what I did was I kind of ran to the other end of campus and got an English major, so I was working on both the science and the English part there, and eventually realized that not only did I like writing, but that you could make a living by writing about science. That was a good fit for me because I got to be sort of involved with science, kind of keep up with science, but I didn’t have to be in the lab doing the science either. It ended up being a good fit for me in the end. Chitra Ragavan:   What was kind of the greatest moment of struggle or adversity in moving towards this career would you say? Sam Kean:   Well, it was about 2007-ish or so, and I was working at some publications. It was going fine, but I realized that the kind of writing I wanted to do was more amenable I think to a book, just getting to go a little bit into the history, having a little bit more leeway to be creative and fun with the language, things like that. I think it worked better in a book. So I decided I wanted to write a book and ended up writing my first book, which was about the Periodic Table. I guess the quick premise was to find like a weird or funny or spooky story about every element on there. I didn’t write the book in a very smart way in that I was going to have 118 individual chapters, one about every element, which would have been a very sort of choppy, not a very pleasant reading experience, I think. Sam Kean:   When I was trying to get that book published in that format, it was a struggle in that I just kept getting rejected over and over. I think it was partly the format, but also partly because I think a lot of agents when they got the initial letter that I sent were probably thinking, “Oh, yuck. The Periodic Table. I hated that thing,” just kind of hit delete. I never heard back

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https://media.blubrry.com/whenitmattered/content.blubrry.com/whenitmattered/When_it_Mattered_18_RD2.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Email | RSS Ep. 18 — A young television news producer watches a colleague save a life by doing CPR and finds her true calling in medicine / Dr. Lisa Sanders, Yale School of Medicine and New York Times Columnist. Early in her career, becoming a doctor was the last thing on Lisa Sanders’ mind. She loved the television news producing business and was happy with her life. Then one day, while shooting an episode on white water rafting, Sanders watched her doctor colleague save an elderly woman from drowning, through CPR. It wasn’t an overnight transformation. But it was an inevitable one, she says. Sanders decided to go to medical school. Since then, Sanders has blazed a unique trail as a doctor and a Professor of Internal Medicine and Education at the Yale School of Medicine, as well as a book author, journalist, and television consultant. She is the author of two popular columns in the New York Times about medical mysteries, called Diagnosis and Think Like a Doctor. She has a new book based on those columns. On that eventful white water rafting trip so long ago, Sanders and her colleague, were testing out their television station’s brand new satellite news van. Decades later, she continues to be fearless about using new technologies in the field of medicine. This time, she’s harnessing the massive power of the Internet to crowdsource diagnoses and bring relief to those suffering, sometimes for decades, from lethal diseases for which there is no name, cure, or reprieve. This Summer, Netflix released a new documentary series in which Dr. Sanders uses that novel, albeit somewhat controversial, technique of global crowdsourcing to help solve eight medical mysteries. Sanders is also helping to reshape the way in which doctors communicate with patients and to give patients and their loved ones a  bigger voice in the often skewed power dynamic. She brings to that commitment her own personal experiences with the medical system, having watched both her mother and sister die without warning and finding the interactions with their doctors deeply lacking in both data and empathy. Transcript Download the PDF Chitra Ragavan:   Hello everyone. I’m Chitra Ragavan, and this is When it Mattered. When it Mattered is a podcast on how leaders deal with and learn from adversity. This episode is brought to you by Goodstory, an advisory firm helping technology startups find their narrative. Chitra Ragavan:   My guest today is the renowned physician, author and journalist, Dr. Lisa Sanders. She’s Associate Professor of Internal Medicine and Education at the Yale School of Medicine. Many of you know Dr. Sanders from her two globally popular New York Times columns about medical mysteries; Diagnosis and Think Like a Doctor. Chitra Ragavan:   The Diagnosis column inspired the hit Fox television series, House, M.D., for which Sanders served as a technical consultant. And now a new Netflix New York Times series also called Diagnosis, showcases Sanders using global crowdsourcing to help diagnose and solve eight medical mysteries. Sanders new book Diagnosis: Solving the Most Baffling Medical Mysteries is a compilation of 50 stories from her column. Dr. Sanders, welcome to the podcast. Lisa Sanders:   Hi, thanks so much for inviting me, Chitra. Chitra Ragavan:   You majored in English in college at William & Mary, and you wrote for your school paper, the Flat Hat. And after you graduated, you became a television news producer. So what prompted you to give up television and go to medical school? Lisa Sanders:   Well, I loved television and I loved the news business, but one day… and it happened over time; nobody really turns on a dime, no matter how they tell the story. But so, one day I was out with the correspondent that I usually worked with, Bob Arnot, or at least I worked with him for years, and we were doing a story about whitewater rafting. And suddenly, he disappeared from the television monitor where I was looking at what we were filming. And we looked around and found him on the banks of this river pulling this elderly woman out of the water. Lisa Sanders:   He pulled her out and laid down, and then he did something that I had really never seen except in TV dramas. He started doing CPR; chest compressions, breathing, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. And after less than a minute, she coughed, turned her head to the side, a ton of water came out of her mouth, and she woke up. She sat up. She was fine. Lisa Sanders:   And to me, that was just amazing. I had never wanted to be a doctor. It was not something that was on my mind. I don’t come from a medical family. And so it had never occurred to me that maybe I would ever want to be a doctor. But when I saw Bob bring this woman back from death, really death, I thought, “Wow! I’m never going to do that.” And it had never occurred to me that I wanted to do that, but it did plant the idea in my mind that I would like to do that. And so a couple of years later, I thought, “Well, maybe I will go to medical school.” And I did. Chitra Ragavan:   So now you’re in medical school and you’re learning the art and science of diagnosis. How did you start to evolve your views on this technique of diagnosis, and what were your initial takeaways about it? Lisa Sanders:   Well, because I had worked with Bob, who was a doctor, I worked with him for four or five years, I felt like I got medicine. I had covered it for years. And so I didn’t feel like I knew what doctors knew, but I understood how medicine worked. And the first two years of medical school are, you sit in a classroom, you listen to lectures, they tell you all the stuff you really